Travelling light
As I sit here, a half-naked man walked outside passing by the coffee shop. He seemed completely unconcerned, weightless like a feather. He probably lived on the kindness of people, and yet did not appear as solicitous of alms as most other beggars. His walk was sprightly, like that of a man on the beach, his mind full of the morning and the peace of the sea.
I had not noticed him before. Knowing that it was just the second day of August, I felt that he was the month’s gift to me — a possible subject of a poem, or at least of an earnest, unhurried reflection. I took him for the latter.
Likely as not, he had the same opportunities to get on as everyone else, to be schooled and trained and to pursue a trade or profession. He could have been one of the people with me in the coffee shop, cultured and debonair and screwed to their laptops, and, if the one who had just left were a representative sample, driving a shiny, new car. But he was not, he had none of the above — in fact only his lower half was covered with the shabbiest of clothes. Something must have happened along the way, but who was I to judge? Enough for me to say that he was a fool.
A fool, but only in the eyes of the world — mine among them, especially when I think of schemes to get promoted and famous, to be a person possessed of money and comfort and worldly goods.
And then I think of St. Francis of Assisi. There was a fool. Wallowing in the easy life as a wealthy silk merchant’s son, a man about town in the company of bright young things, Francis abandoned all this after coming in contact with poverty and being disillusioned with the world’s values. When with threats and beatings his father tried to dissuade him from helping the needy, often by selling cloths from his father’s store, he renounced both père and pelf and took off his clothes, and began the life of a beggar in Assisi.
“We are fools for Christ’s sake,” said St. Paul.
But the world has its share of fools too. One of them appears in an engraving made by Adriaen Collaert, a 16th-century Flemish artist. The engraving is based on a parable narrated in the Gospel of Luke, more popularly known as the Parable of the Rich Fool.
Jesus spoke of a rich man whose land has huge harvests. “What shall I do, for I have nowhere to store my crops?” he asked himself. Then he said, “I will pull down my barns, and build larger ones; and there I will store all my grain and my goods. And I will say to my soul, Soul, you have ample goods laid up for many years; take your ease, eat, drink, be merry.”
Jesus added, “But God said to him, ‘Fool! This night your soul is required of you; and the things you have prepared, whose will they be?’ So is he who lays up treasure for himself, and is not rich toward God.”
In Collaert’s engraving, we see the rich man together with his friends and neighbors, gesturing towards a barn being built, near which roam dog and swine while under a tree a beggar rests.
The inclusion of the beggar is significant. It recalls St. Augustine’s comment on the parable, that the rich farmer was “planning to fill his soul with excessive and unnecessary feasting and was proudly disregarding all those empty bellies of the poor. He did not realize that the bellies of the poor were much safer storerooms than his barns.”
St. Augustine seems to address me, reminding that I walk along the same road with the impoverished. “He’s carrying nothing with him, you are carrying more than you need. You are overloaded; give him some of what you’ve got. At a stroke, you feed him and lessen your load.”
This makes me think of an incident that happened not too long ago. We were at Charles de Gaulle Airport, checking in for the return flight. Fearing that he had excess baggage, a friend distributed to us the packs of biscuits and other edibles he had accumulated so as not to pay a surcharge.
I believe that at Heaven’s Gate, as at airports, there is such a surcharge.
